What are you most excited about with To Have To Shoot Irishmen?
The play ticks so many boxes for me. I started acting because I wanted to make work with a real social and political conscience, and this play does so. It’s got a real heart, and I’m really excited to get started and meet everybody.

For me, getting to perform at the Liverpool Everyman is the fulfilment of an ambition. It’s my home town theatre and there were two events that led to me formulating that I could, and would, act. Seeing The Kindness of Strangers by Tony Green and seeing Pete Postlethwaite do King Lear at the old Everyman. They were two formative experiences that I’m almost certain would mean that had I not encountered them, I wouldn’t be acting, let alone doing this play!

The Kindness of Strangers was a play set in Liverpool with a huge heart and wonderful performances. It looked at the fabric of the city, how it was built on immigration, how it was altering and how different people were reacting to the change and I just thought, “Wow, If I ever do this, I want to do stuff like that.”

I saw King Lear about five years later. I’d just been made redundant from my full-time job and had long since gave up on the idea of becoming an actor and I thought, “That’s amazing, I want to do that” and it was then or never, so I took the plunge and here I am, 10 years later. So I think getting to perform at the Everyman is going to be a rounding of a circle for me.

I can’t wait, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it.

Robbie is playing William in To Have To Shoot Irishmen, at the Everyman, 25 - 27 Oct.
Read the interview in full on Almanac Arts.